Chris Selley: How is this a public school system?

Public schools full of rich kids raise more money from parents than public schools full of poor kids. Stop the presses.

It’s easy to be cynical about Social Planning Toronto’s report, released this week, on massive fundraising imbalances among the city’s public schools — we’re talking about differences of up to $500 and even $1,000 per student during the 2008-09 school year. Frankly, the report almost encourages it. But the underlying inequities call into question the very soul of public education.

If you accept that a public school in Rosedale is just inherently better than one in Malvern, do you really have a public-education system anymore? One to be proud of, anyway? Ontarians wouldn’t put up with the province offering five times better medical care to people in Windsor than people in Ottawa. But that’s basically what’s happening in our schools.

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The report does itself no favours with its strident main recommendation: Banning parental donations to public schools, contingent upon the provincial government funding all schools to a level where donations would be unnecessary. The first part will offend many; the second part is excessively utopian, and doesn’t fit in a headline. They’d have been better off leading with their Plan B — pooling all parental donations and distributing them evenly — but even that’s a pretty brazen ask.

Also somewhat problematic is that the report insists upon comparing fundraising only against the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) learning opportunities index — a “measure of external socio-economic challenges faced by students.” The more challenges, the less money, and vice versa: “The most marginalized 20% of the schools … raise less than 1/3 of the funds that the least marginalized 20% of schools raise.”

That’s an important way to look at the issue. But surely cold, hard results are just as valuable a comparator, and highlight better just what’s at stake. Among TDSB schools ranked by the Fraser Institute based on standardized test scores, the top 10 fundraisers brought in $515 per student and got an average 8.75 out of 10 rating. The bottom 10 fundraisers brought in $17 per student, and averaged a 5.3 rating.

Or, look at it the other way: The top 10 TDSB schools in the Fraser Institute rankings — all ranked 10 or 9.9 — raised an average of $164.45 per student. The bottom 10, with an average rating of 2.3, brought in an average of $58.64.

There is by no means a straight-line correlation between fundraising and academic achievement, as the top 10-ranked schools show. The most any of them raised was $234.86 per student — 73 schools raised more than that. And one of the 10-out-of-10 schools was among the bottom-10 TDSB fundraisers. Great teachers are priceless, and donations mostly worthless without them.

Still, there are legitimate reasons to grit one’s teeth over the fundraising discrepancies. Ideally, it wouldn’t be this way. Public education would be one product, and others would be available for purchase. Why do we cling to the myth of single-tier education less tightly than the myth of single-tier healthcare? (Or maybe don’t. Maybe we abandon each just as quickly when it’s our own knee that needs replacing or own child who needs educating.)

It’s also annoying that the provincial regulations seem deliberately designed to encourage the bending and novel interpretation of rules governing extra fees and fundraising. Officially, the provincial curriculum should be available to all students without a single extra dime being paid. But then there’s this: “While no student should be excluded from participating in any school activity or event based on the ability to pay, some activities or events may require some recovery of the cost for participation.” Nudge. Wink. Say no more.

This is certainly a good opportunity to consider the current state and future of public education. But if we’re to maintain the system largely as it is, the energy it would take to level this fairly obscure fundraising playing field would be far better expended simply tending to the kids who are worst off. Bringing Nelson Mandela Park middle school’s $16-per-student fundraising in line with Whitney Junior Public School’s $1,026 won’t address the bedrock reasons the former is ranked 2.0 by the Fraser Institute and the latter 8.6. Programs like Pathways to Education, the unapologetically interventionist and spectacularly successful program that lures, prods and counsels at-risk students towards graduation, would.

Such programs cost a fortune, relatively speaking — paid for by all of us, whether or not we have kids and wherever they go to school. But few long-term government investments promise better payoffs down the line. People have always debated the importance of social inequalities, but nobody denies the importance of education.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.